- The great community, of course.
- Level of customisability is rather nice.
- Everything works as expected without much trouble.
- I get packages with the features/dependencies I want.
- I feel most comfortable with Gentoo than with any other distro._________________meow.

* The community is fantastic, as most others will likely mention
* Nearly everything is in Portage, so there's not the (admittedly minor, but nonetheless existant) hassle of configuring alternate repositories or other similar things.
* The documentation is EXTREMELY thurough (heck I still use it as reference for a bunch of stuff and I'm on Fedora...)
* At install time the system is already updated._________________~~ Peter: Programmer, Mathematician, STEM & Free Software Advocate, Enlightened Agent, Transhumanist, Fedora contributor
Who am I? :: EFF & FSF

Because I'd never go back to using a commercial operating system, and gentoo is the best free solution... It's better than the non-free ones aswell

I like having complete control over my system, even though I'm no developer and I'm not getting the absolute best performance from it. And ever since I started using gentoo exclusively I haven't had to upgrade my system, it's been about a year-and-a-half. Portage is probably the best part. It's so easy to find and install packages. It's like a big box full of software and it's all free. (Except for those commercial games )

I first tried red hat 8 a real long time ago, it was my first linux attempt. I had no clue what was going on. I think I installed gnome and kde Anyways, I had it installed for about a week and then got rid of it and went back to windows. red hat seemed like windows but without as much software and hardware support. Then, a year or 2 later I got a 64-bit processor, the same one I have now, an Opteron 146. I wanted to try 64-bit so I downloaded the suse dvd Took really long. Then I installed it and thought it was pretty neat, it had a lot of cool stuff on it, so I definitely thought it was better than windows, but it's owned by novell, and I really don't want to use their software (person reasons ). Plus I found it quite slow, althought the YaST control center is cool.

So then someone recommended gentoo and I then tried 3 times to install it. Once I got it working I stuck with it for about a month and realised I had a really bad install. So I tried again with all the stuff I learned from my first attempt, and that's my system now. I learned so much about linux from gentoo and I can apply all that to my system. Not that I'm much a performance guy. I basically just use my computer for music, instant messaging, email, internet, and sometimes video games.

Oh, and I love being able to tell my high school teachers that KOffice can't create .doc files.

By the way, I've been using Penguins for some years now and have used Slackware, RedHat, SuSE, Fedora, openSuSE and other distributions. My first one was a 3.X slackware and the last one before Gentoo was SuSE 9.0. These last 2 years have been fun I've also used/use SLES, and Knoppix / sysresccd._________________Jorge.

That pretty much sums it up. I love it when I tell my computer to do something and it acutally listens to me. I have been on Gentoo for a long time, and I can very safely say, that it is my only distribution. (Even if there is a graphical installer now )

--sonik_________________"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of a child and the feeble mentality of the average adult" --Freud

- It is free.
- It is somewhat educational
- Large software repository
- Delivers sources along with software (Some of the snippets serve as great examples)
- Very easy to follow documentation
- Coloured by default shell
- Configuration is simple._________________At some stage, the Hindus locked on to the nation destroying concepts like ahimsa (non-violence), shanti (peace), satya (truth) — the ‘ass’ syndrome.

Having tried various flavors before and after Gentoo, I have found that Gentoo is simply the best. It keeps me interested by its level of difficulty in comparison to many of your other "point-and-click install" distros with less versatile package managers. The fact that it is a source-based is a major selling point to me, as binary distributions just dont optimize enough. I have personally learned more about linux from using Gentoo than I have from any other distribution in my seven years of using linux. The fact that I tried Gentoo, used other distros (including various UNIX distributions), and came back, is the most indicative point of my experience though.

I guess its mostly the community, and the fact that portage doesn't get in my way of doing things. For example, in Ubuntu, you need to do everything the way the distrobution expects it. In gentoo, it doesn't really care, and even the hackiest solution to a problem will work.

- The great community, of course.
- Level of customisability is rather nice.
- Everything works as expected without much trouble.
- I get packages with the features/dependencies I want.
- I feel most comfortable with Gentoo than with any other distro.

I use Gentoo because it puts me in control: it's a Free OS, it's transparent with text-file-based manual configuration, it's very customizable (useflags, cflags, etc). It has an excellent package manager (although there's always room for improvement) which provides loads of packages and the best dependancy handling I've seen so far. Of course it also has a nice community, which is very helpful._________________"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

Because of Portage.
The tool is simply amazing, I used to use Red Hat before this, I didn't mind some of the GUI tools, but I found them to be lacking somewhat. When I came to Gentoo I was forced to learn how to manage my configuration with text files, and while I can probably carry this over to any other distribution, they still didn't encourage use of the command line over point and click. Then enter "emerge." The way it handles everything, the way you can modify it with /etc/portage, everything you can change on programs to suit your needs. This is exactly what I needed, when I was using Red Hat, and SuSE I found it odd that I couldn't play my mp3's, then I figured out "oh, I need to find the codec" only to go and look for one, find a suitable RPM and hope it worked, whereas with Gentoo I can be assured that with the right USE flags it saves me the headache of handing codecs. The Gentoo installation method is one that ensures that you have some idea what's going on when you're done installing it.
Besides Plug and Play, everything with Gentoo...just works. SuSE had problems with my wireless card, Ubuntu's just flat out stupid, and Debian and Slackware are... best way to put it is "meh"
Gentoo is Gentoo, that's the only way to put it._________________

Quote:

It is with people as with trees. The more one seeks to rise into height and light, the more vigorously do ones roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep — into evil.

USE flags and community. I could really do without all the compiling but, of course, that isn't possible and still have USE flags.

The last time I had Ubuntu on my machine, I tried to remove all the bluetooth packages as they are worthless to me. Apt insisted that it would have to uninstall the entire kernel... Shortly thereafter, I restored my stage4 backup.

Gentoo works pretty much the way I feel a linux distribution *should* work.

I tried RedHat, suse, mandrake & debian for a long time and always felt somewhat frustrated with them, mostly in non-specific ways that I couldn't quite identify. Debian was closest to what I felt I wanted, but still fell short.

Gentoo is a basic, minimal framework onto which you graft what you need. It's not a pre-formed solution where if it doesn't do what you want it to do then you're stuffed. Pre-formed solutions have a very important place, I'd just like them to be built with a nice configurable back end, like gentoo.

It's fluid, and you can avoid the big bang updates - they always scare the hell outta me. Of course you can go for big-bang updates if you so wish.

For some reason I love the idea that everything is compiled to your machine. I've often wanted a generic library of pre-compiled binaries for gentoo, I think it's possible and should be done, but when I start thinking of all the possible things that *could* affect whether a pre-built binary will work on a particular gentoo installation: architecture, cpu version, gcc version, libc version, kernel includes version, kernel, dependant libraries versions, CFLAGS, USE flags, etc, I start to realise how much information is needed and how specific a gentoo build can be. Changing one of the base criteria can have a profound effect on most/all packages in the system which gentoo lets you sort out (from revdep-rebuild to emerge -e world). With a binary distribution, they can only practically support a small subset of the possible configurations, gentoo is pretty much fully flexible here.

My reasons pretty much echo what everyone else has said: superb community & documentation, unlimited customisation (I like my system to be lean), rock-solid stability, security and a dev team that actually listens to, and interacts with, its users.

*)the community*) my freedom
*) the fact that Gentoo at least tries to be community driven
*) being able to "look under the hood"*) getting a chance to learn stuff
*) and last but not least the community!